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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Shadowbane Hacking Redux - Guild Bannings 39

Posted by simoniker from the deserted-guild-cities dept.
Thanks to Shacknews for pointing to a report on Gamerifts.com tracking the results of the investigation into the Shadowbane MMORPG hacking. According to a post on the official Ubisoft forums reprinted there, "..all of the members from the Guild Invictus were banned from Shadowbane for using teleport exploits, many of which culminated during the events of May 27th and 28th. As all members where banned, all money has been removed from their buildings and their Tree of Life, and the city will be left to die." There's no news on whether criminal charges may be filed, as threatened when the original exploit took place.
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Shadowbane Hacking Redux - Guild Bannings More

Shadowbane Hacking Redux - Guild Bannings

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  • Tree of Life (Score:1, Funny)

    by baloogan ( 676218 )
    OMG they have lost all the money in their tree of life! last time they threatened legal action and now they responded with botanical action!!!

  • This makes sense (Score:2, Interesting)

    by saladpuncher ( 633633 )
    A person (or guild) cheating in the game should be punished IN the game. Instead of bringing legal action against the warrior who cheated his way to a +25 Vorpal Sword of Absolute Killing the character should be stripped of his items and banned. Hopefully any characters "harmed" in the exploits will be returned to full status and given a few experience points, or what-not, for having survived the temporal disturbance (or whatever else they are going to call it).

    • Re:This makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There is something neat about having a deserted city. It would be even cooler if the whole thing had been incorporated entirely as an in-game event, with some sort of deity punishing the violators. I kinda hope they turn the city in some sort of haunted grounds, with the lost souls of the guild terrorizing lost wanderers.
      • Not a bad idea at all. Since this is a role-playing game they should all just role-play the events as though some evil god/deity/demon/Q-Continuum thingy took over for a few hours. Leave the city as a warning to those that attempt to use magic (hacking) for evil.
        • And even cooler would be if the could manage to keep the offenders playing, forever doomed to pay $12 monthly and not being able to leave the city or say more than "Ooooooooh".
      • Taking the actions and turning them into some kind of in-game element would only encourage that kind of behavior in the future.
        • Trust me, anyone that finds another way to teleport himself or anyone else at will in a world, will NOT need any encouragement to use it.
          The second way you could mean it is that other people are going to be looking for similar flaws because of it. Again, I'm certain that's happening now, not because of the aftermath, but because they realize if the coders let one slip through, there are probably others waiting to be found.
          The players got a taste of blood, and they're going to spend a lot of time trying to g

  • hah. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Suppafly ( 179830 )
    There's no news on whether criminal charges may be filed, as threatened when the original exploit took place.

    Your honor, the accused made use of features available in the game that my clients charged them to play, for this your should lock them up.
    • You're a bit hazy on the concept of a MMORPG. They weren't available features. It's Ubisoft's server that these guys affectively ruined for a few hours. Just like hacking a commercial website, employees had to spend extra hours fixing the problem, and (arguably) customers may have been lost.
  • Next thing you know they'll be trying to sue every kiddie who cheats in Counter-Strike

    • Re:legal action my ass (Score:2, Informative)

      by d3kk ( 644538 )
      ... Except cheating in Counterstrike doesn't really have any effect except pissing people off. It doesn't cost anything to boot somebody from a Counterstrike server. These kids actually disrupted a server which people were paying to use, and employees who are being paid to work had to spend extra hours fixing it.

  • Retarded (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 )
    This is one of the many reasons so many people hate MMORPGs. The makers are usually so anal retentive about the exploitation of bugs. Seems so hypocritical seeing as how its their fault the bug exists in the first place. If they don't want people "exploiting" they should just fix the damn bugs. Furthermore, this mass banning benefits no one. Players are pissed, company looses money, so what's the friggen point?

    Enough said.

    • Re:Retarded (Score:5, Insightful)

      by novas007 ( 411673 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @02:03AM (#6088459) Homepage
      Have you ever written a large-scale game? Or for that matter, any sort of large software program with many many users? Probably not, though I see your subspace zone- after the fall of VIE, I always preferred Trench Wars. :)

      Sure, they coded the bug in, so of course it's their fault, right? And you, on the other hand, are perfect? You never make errors? I'll help you a bit- it's not "looses", it's "loses". You made a grammatical error in 6-sentence comment. They made an error in what is probably a 500K+ line program.

      I am by no means defending the declining quality of newly-released games, but at the same time I am willing to cut them slack- I know what it's like. Tight deadlines do not do good things for code quality. At the same time, MMORPGs are pretty close to a worst-case game scenario. Millions of users, very large world, and a dev team nowhere near the size of the user base. Cheating results in very real advantages over other players- instead of a good record (ie, cheating in CS), cheating MMORPG players can even go as far as selling their ill-gotten gains for real money.

      As for the benefits of the mass banning- think on this. Some people do not cheat. How do you think they feel when they see people cheat? Pretty bad, I'd think. That's the sort of situation that one would not pay to be in. So you lose some non-cheaters due to cheaters. So, you lose the kind of people you'd like to play with due to the people who have no respect for those around them. Does that sound good to you?
      • Actually as a matter of fact I am currently involved in a large scale software project (currently two years in the making) and I know exactly what it's like. Bugs are inevitable, but its not the user's responsibility to take the heat for the programmer's screw ups. That'd be like you going to jail for taking Advil yesterday because the drug was made illegal today.

        As far as I'm concerned, the SB players who exploited the bug were well within their right to do so. Deadline or not, software should be released

        • Except... (Score:2, Insightful)

          by JazzManDRP ( 158742 )
          Except you're wrong.

          Half the point of any MMO game is community... Is sharing a game... Is a bajillion people sat on a server sharing an experience - either competitively or as part of a team.

          So, it's okay to foul in football while nobody's looking? Okay to cut corners in a race when you're not being watched? I think not.

          Whatever the bug was, as part of the MMO community the players involved had a moral duty to report the bug to the devs - and help to fix the game they are supposed to be a part of

        • >Bugs are inevitable, but its not the user's responsibility to take the heat
          >for the programmer's screw ups.

          The user is not taking the heat for the programmer's screwups- the user is
          taking the heat for EXPLOITING the screwup- an important difference.

          >That'd be like you going to jail for taking Advil yesterday because the drug
          >was made illegal today.

          I'm sorry, but that analogy makes no sense. This is not retroactive
          enforcement of a law, this is a bunch of users violating the terms of their
          agre
        • That'd be like you going to jail for taking Advil yesterday because the drug was made illegal today.

          It's more like getting arrested for smoking crack you found left on the sidewalk. You know you're not supposed to do it, but you did it anyways.
        • Please tell us what this large scale software project is and the company you work for is?

          So that we may stay away from it.
    • Furthermore, this mass banning benefits no one.

      I disagree. It benefits the honest players a great deal. What people like you don't seem to understand is that when people like the guild that was banned and those like you (who feel that exploiting is fine and dandy and it's their fault for leaving the bugs in there) get pissed and leave MMORPG X, Y, or Z, the game company is HAPPY and so are the majority of other players. Your $13/month, and the 13$/month of everyone that act like this isn't worth it to

  • let me be the first to say... (Score:4, Funny)

    by kurosawdust ( 654754 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @01:50AM (#6088431)
    "..all of the members from the Guild Invictus..."

    Straight outta Ye Olde Compton?

    • [comment type="grammical" degree="anal"]
      "The Olde Compton", not "Ye Olde Compton".

      There used to a letter that represented the 'th' sound named thorn in the English language. A stylized version of it looked similiar to 'y', and that's why old signs often appear to have 'y' on them. (When the printing press came over from Germany, 'y' was used instead of thorn since thorn is a Scandanavian letter, absent from the Germanic languages - thus printing presses didn't have the letter.
      [/comment]

  • Anyway, it was a hacked client (Score:3, Interesting)

    by swmccracken ( 106576 ) on Sunday June 01, 2003 @04:27AM (#6088906) Homepage
    I'm unfamilar with this game and set up, but presumably people paid for these accounts. Are all the members of this Guild Invicitus guilty of abusing such features? I can imagine that various members are innocents that thought they were just joining a powerful team.

    If there's no reasonable evidence that all of that guild are guilty, it seems harsh (no comeback?) (Perhaps they are and I'm just ignorant - I can't tell.)

    Anyway, the servers were not attacked. "UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that the Shadowbane servers were not compromised in any way. The "hack" was only client side, our fears regarding the security issues for our Credit Cards and accounts have been put at ease." states the updated report [gamerifts.com]. Good greif, is this another game depending on client security? (Design flaw - the client will be hacked by somebody in this kind of game and your game should be designed to cope.)

    I *hope* for the players of this game that there was a bug in the server side validation of what the clients were sending, rather than a blatent design flaw.
    • Good greif, is this another game depending on client security? (Design flaw - the client will be hacked by somebody in this kind of game and your game should be designed to cope.)

      This is the mantra of every armchair game designer out there. Thanks to Raph [legendmud.org] everyone thinks they could be a better designer.

      Yet every online game that comes out has a hack in the client! I promise you that SWG [sony.com] will have one as well - despite the fact that Raph works on it.

  • Can you go see it? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Asprin ( 545477 ) <(gsarnold) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Sunday June 01, 2003 @07:15AM (#6089294) Homepage Journal

    Cool - a real virtual wrath of God ghost town. I Like it. Can you still go there in the game and see it now that it's all dead and stuff? They should put up some signs there to warn people why it's a bad idea to cheat. Maybe they could even turn it into a folk tale or urban ledgend in the game that mothers tell their children to keep them from cheating. Maybe even build a ghost-town spook story quest around it.

  • Does this strike anyone one else as the online equivalent of a nerd slap fight?

    Oh no don't take my tree of life, what ever shall I do without it. I realize the game is a business and needs to be protected from exploiters or it will die (see Counter Strike) but the self important tone which permeates the post makes me want to push them down and kick cyber sand in their eyes.

    If it was a hack ban them, if it was an exploit demote the project manager. Prosecuting/banning players(the customers) that use loopho
  • "Oh no! Banned from other ubi.com games! Shadowbane is such a flaming pile of poop that Ubi is in fact doing these people a favor."

    Just about sums up what I have heard about UBI's games and about Shadowbane.
    • lol my thoughts exactly. I was a beta tester for SB and I didnt even give .0000001 seconds of thought about buying this game post release. Funniest part is banning players for life...how they plan on enforcing it? (1) ask freind for credit card (2) pay friend money you took off his card (3) open new account. (4) grief every single player you can find for getting "banned" and stink up the game as much as possible. At least that is what I would do if I actually gave a shit. I wonder how many that were "banned
  • It seems these hackers were actually pretty cool. Wired has the story on what they did: [wired.com]

    Late Tuesday evening, little things suddenly started to go very wrong in the virtual world of Shadowbane, a popular online multiplayer game.

    Some players noticed that their money and weapons had suddenly vanished. A few whispered that tonight the monsters somehow seemed slightly bigger and meaner.

    And then all hell broke loose.

    Shadowbane had been hacked by several of its players. But unlike standard game hacks,

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